Nancy Lynch

Nancy Ann Lynch (born January 19, 1948) is a computer scientist affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the EECS department and heads the "Theory of Distributed Systems" research group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Education and early life Lynch was born in Brooklyn, and her academic training was in mathematics. She attended Brooklyn College and MIT, where she received her Ph.D. in 1972 under the supervision of Albert R. Meyer.

Work She served on the math and computer science faculty at several other universities, including Tufts University, the University of Southern California, Florida International University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), prior to joining the MIT faculty in 1982. Since then, she has been working on applying mathematics to the tasks of understanding and constructing complex distributed systems. She has overseen the work of over 25 doctoral students, 50 master’s students, and several postdoctoral researchers.

Her 1985 work with Michael J. Fischer and Mike Paterson on consensus problems received the PODC Influential-Paper Award in 2001. Their work showed that in an asynchronous distributed system, consensus is impossible if there is one processor that crashes. On their contribution, Jennifer Welch wrote that "this result has had a monumental impact in distributed computing, both theory and practice. Systems designers were motivated to clarify their claims concerning under what circumstances the systems work." She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and an ACM Fellow.

Recognition 1997: ACM Fellow 2001: Dijkstra Paper Prize of PODC conference 2001: Elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for the development of theoretical foundations for distributed computing. 2006: Van Wijngaarden Award 2007: Knuth Prize 2007: Dijkstra Paper Prize of PODC conference 2010: IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award 2012: Athena Lecturer 2015: National Academy of Sciences